Sunday, December 18, 2016

The perfect news to kick off a Friday night bender. No one has a direct quote on this, as the event at which Kushner said it apparently wasn’t recorded, but three different papers — the NYT, Daily News, and Politico — heard about it from people who were there.

The president-elect’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, told New York business leaders on Friday that Mr. Trump’s vision for a large-scale federal infrastructure program was “closer” to Senator Chuck Schumer’s, the incoming minority leader, than to the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell’s.

Mr. Kushner made the remarks at an event hosted by the Partnership for New York City, just after an appearance by Mr. Schumer, the New York senator.

This week at a news conference in Washington, Mr. McConnell said he was not interested in “trillion-dollar stimulus” to finance any infrastructure plan, setting up what could be the first of many clashes with a Trump White House that will not always hew to Republican orthodoxy.

Republicans want to do this mainly through tax credits, which Democrats fear won’t stimulate new construction projects but rather will act as giveaways to developers for projects that would have been built anyway. Democrats want to do it mainly through direct federal spending, which Republicans fear will end up producing the mother of all pork-barrel fiascos. Kushner’s comment, presumably, means that Trump is more inclined to do it through direct spending than through tax credits, even though credits are what he touted during the campaign when he had to worry about consolidating his own party. Steve Bannon also sounds like he wants to do things through direct spending, partly (or mainly?) because he knows that’s likely to produce more political benefits for Trump himself. ...